'Community' gets a second swing at its third season

Kate O'HareZap2It

After leaving the air on Dec. 8, NBC's quirky comedy "Community" -- beloved by a rabid few but, unfortunately for ratings-starved NBC, not adored by double-digit millions of Nielsen families -- returns on Thursday, March 15, to finish out its third season (with a fourth a big question mark).

"We're in the middle of shooting our finale right now," says star Danny Pudi in mid-February, dressed, as are all the main cast members, in a hospital gown. 'This isn't the finale; these are pickups from another episode, but it's our final week of shooting 'Community,' maybe forever. We don't know.

"It's an exciting time on set, stress-filled, maybe. And I'm wearing a hospital gown. Is that part of the wardrobe? Maybe. We don't know. Are we mental patients? We don't know. I don't know what's going on."

"They wouldn't let me," he says. "I think they were worried that I would injure myself."

And at some point, co-star Chevy Chase booms his way through several takes of a peculiar song that includes multiple recitations of "You're welcome."

In other words, it's just another day at fictional Greendale Community College, where Pudi and his co-stars play adult students who have little in common besides being thrown together in a study group.

Created by Dan Harmon ('The Sarah Silverman Show"), "Community" has become known for its offbeat characters, dense and frequent pop-culture references, unconventional storylines and concepts (from a full-on paintball-war action movie and a stop-motion animated Christmas special to multiple alternate timelines), and tonal shifts (from laugh-out-loud funny to bemused to occasionally poignant).

"It's not an easy show," Pudi says. "I think there is a place for a show on television and in the world that's experimental. There is an experimental comedic nature to this show. That's what it feels like to me, like every week, we're exploring the human psyche in some way, from a different perspective."

It's also allowed the actors to show a range, particularly McHale. Before playing the series' closest thing to a leading man, former lawyer Jeff Winger, he was known mostly for light humor and as host of "The Soup" on E! Entertainment Television.

"It's been a real sandbox to play in," he says, a coat thrown over his hospital gown, "from being naked playing pool to being an action star to being a vampire to who knows? It's just been great.

"I have not played an elderly Chinese woman yet. That's the one slot I've got to fill in there."

Brown appreciates the relationships around the study-room table.

"These characters," she says, "are people that you know or people that you're like in some way. What's beautiful about these people is, no matter what they do to each other, they forgive and move on, which I think is great, and the fact that we have a racist and five or six different religions, different races, all mixed together.

"You have Jeff Winger, who doesn't care about anybody, or isn't supposed to care about anyone, who doesn't believe in love, but he does. Everybody's growing beyond the person that they always were on this show. I just think it's universal in that way.

Along with laughs, "Community" can also break hearts "in a good way," says Brown, "and then put them back together at the end of the episode, because that's what life is."